Mearls On D&D's Design Premises/Goals

Charlaquin said:

Sure, but I don’t see how 0e-2e are relevant.

Mearls’ Claim (paraphrased): 3e and 4e were built around trying to make the gameplay experience as consistent s possible from one table to another. This, combined with an emphasis on providing players lots of mechanical options, lead to a negative play experience, so for 5e we focused on giving the DM the freedom to make their game their own, and focused player options on story.

My counter-claim: Those are great design goals, but I think you could have achieved them without taking away the multitude of mechanical options 3e and 4e provided players with.

It seems to me that “Well, 2e had more DM freedom and fewer mechanical options too!” is a nonsequitur. What does that have to do with Mearls’ claim or my counter-claim? Like, I’ve heard from a lot of folks who liked 2e that 5e reminds them of it, and that’s awesome, but reiterating that fact doesn’t seem to contribute anything to the conversation about whether or not 5e could have accomplished its goals without reducing player options.

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The game's history and lineage go back farther than 3e; and because it's a history that 5e was in part intentionally trying to revive and-or return to it can't be ignored in discussions like this.

robus said:

And, of course, there's Paizo's Bagel Emporium that's opened right next door!

Edit: Speak of the devil: http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?5626-Pathfinder-s-Runelords-Are-Returning!

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IMO, honestly, PF isn’t a particularly good game. If you’re going to make an option heavy, mechanically complex and clearly defined, game, it needs to also be fairly well balanced. PF is only balanced in comparison to late 3.5 with all the official supplements available.

TwoSix said:

As a total aside, I never understood power gamers who exhibited this behavior. I love players who build their characters around their concept with no concern for mechanical effectiveness. (This isn't passive aggressive condescension, they're really my favorite type of fellow players.) I can do the heavy lifting during combat, and they can be the focus of the attention during the exploration/puzzle solving/planning stages of the game, when I usually prefer to take a back seat. It's a synergy that we appreciate.

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indeed. Heck, I use CharOp mastery to make interesting rileplaying characters that don’t suck in any given pillar, while satisfyingly representing a specific concept in a way where my mechanical options show, so I don’t have to tell.

happyhermit said:

4e got flack for every class feeling similar, it sounds like what you are talking about is every member of a class being the similar. Unless you are arguing that the 5e Wizard class is more similar to the 5e Fighter class than the 4e Wizard class is to the 4e fighter class, in that case you would be wrong by a whole host of metrics.

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Honestly, for most classes, different builds/power sets within a class play more differently than is he case for most 5e classes (or any other edition).

Flexor the Mighty! said:

I'm just glad I'm not the only person in D&D fandom who thinks Firefly was crap. But at least it wasn't as bad as Buffy I guess.

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Its ok, having bad opinions doesn’t make you a bad person.

Jester David said:

The problem with that logic is twofold.
First, option creep = power creep. The more options are in the game, the more broken the game becomes. More options are inherently more unbalanced.

Second, replayability is fine, but in 3e and 4e more options were being released than could ever be played. In this analogy, this would be restaurants adding new entrees every few months, making the menu larger and larger....

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This is a weird argument, IMO. I won’t ever play every option, sure. But my group will eventually play most of them, and all the groups I know will probably play all of them.

More importantly, there is nothing in 4e that is like the Assassin, or the Gloom Pact Hexblade, or a Cunning Bard who incongruously focused on fighting in melee, or a multi-target focused mixed range rogue (dagger thrower or hand crossbow build), or a Beast Master Ranger, or I could go on and on.

PHB only 5e is fun, but very limited, and most players I have ever known just aren’t going to make certain types of characters if there isn’t a relatively clear option for it. There isn’t a combination of options in the PHB that makes a “Spirit Talker”/Shaman type character that mechanically plays like the concept, so the player just opts to play a different concept. Then Xanathar’s comes out, and that player is thrilled that she can play that earlier concept now. It doesn’t matter that she won’t ever even read through the Sorcerer options in the book, she doesn’t care about sorcerer stuff. Yep book has increased her ability to play her “1st choice” character concept when a campaign is starting, instead of settling for something else.

Umbran said:

Dude, how many different D&D characters do you play in a year? Don't include one-shots at cons, because those don't really give you a full experience of playing a character. How many campaign characters do you play in a year?

The 5e PHB has a full dozen character classes. Even if we leave out the various choices within each class, you get a dozen distinct campaign characters out of that. If a campaign runs something around a year... we have a decade of play there? But 5e is said to not have enough options?

So, whatever your own proclivities, I don't see "replayablity" as the broad issue. I think is it far simpler.

My wife crochets. A lot. She has a spinning wheel, and fiber to spin. She's got a large stash of yarn she's bought and yarn she's made, a fistful or two of hooks, and a library of patterns. Because when you are *making* a thing, you need options to make the thing you want, the way you want it - for a shawl, there's the material the yarn is made of, and it's thickness and texture, it's color, and the pattern and size-gauge of the stitches, all impacting the final product and its characteristics.

Broadly, having options is about being able to *craft* your character. If play is significantly about Making a Thing and putting it through its paces, then you need a lot of mechanical options, or you aren't really Making a Thing.

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I mostly agree with this, but I’d like to point out that replayability isn’t determined by total options, but by total options within the scope of what broad types of characters a given player likes to play. A dozen classes doesn’t mean much if your group are all players that each have maybe 3 classes they’re likely to ever play.

pemerton said:

No edition of D&D ever - includinge 5e - has used the following method for resolving combat:

The player says how their PC is going to defeat their opponent in combat. The GM then tells them whether they win, whether they lose, or if a an ability check is required. If the lattermost, the GM specifies which ability is required, and what proficiencie(s), if any, might apply. The GM also sets a DC. If the check equals or exceeds the DC, the PC wins the fight. Otherwise s/he loses, with consequences determined by the GM.​

And I think an attempt to publish a version of D&D that had such a rule would not be regarded as "perfectly fine" by most D&D players.

The fact that non-combat resolution is handled more-or-less like that in both 2nd ed AD&D and 5e tells us something about how the game is expected to work: players can use the combat rules to impose changes on the gameworld that don't need to be mediate through GM decision-making (unless the GM outright fudges); but the same is not true for non-combat action declarations.

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I, like the post I quoted, was referring to non-combat resolutions.

Combat in D&D (all editions), as in most RPG systems, has reasonably solid combat resolution mechanics.

Charlaquin said:

That is the general topic of discussion in this thread, yes, but the conversation I was having with Lanefan was about the specific part of the tweets where he said that the interaction between rules trying to be as consistent as possible and mechanical options that break the power curve was resolved by focusing instead on flexibility and story.

My argument is that the reduction of options wasn’t a necessary part of fixing the problem Mearls identified. The fact that earlier editions had fewer options does not counter my argument, or for that matter, have any relevance to it.

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Where I think the reduction of options was an essential part of fixing the problems, and that (t)he looked back to pre-3e D&D for inspiration makes looking at those earlier editions very relevant indeed.

Parmandur said:

Lanefan thought it was a relevant part of the discussion, and I would agree. Just saying it is irrelevant doesn't make it so.

The balance they struck certainly isn't logically necessary, that's why they did extensive playtesting to see what worked in reality.

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Lanefan said:

The game's history and lineage go back farther than 3e; and because it's a history that 5e was in part intentionally trying to revive and-or return to it can't be ignored in discussions like this.

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What difference does whether or not 0e-2e had lots of mechanics make to the question of whether or not lots of mechanics would preclude 5e from meeting the design goal of fixing the 3e/4e problem that was caused by a combination of heavy mechanics and a focus on consistency between groups? Would your stance on the matter be any different if 0e-2e had all been chock full of mechanical options? Cause if not, it isn’t a relevant detail.

Psikerlord# said:

Cakewalk has become more and more overt however from 2e onwards. -10 before dead, then I forget 3e, but 4e had death saves making it hard to die and finally 5e it's almost impossible to die, short of a full TPK. And even if you do die, no worries, 3rd level revivify and done. Death is a speedbump on the plot train, because the show must go on.

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At the theory level I agree with you.

At the practice level -10 before dead was a very widely used option in 1e; though it wasn't in the original 3 books and I forget when it came out, it did appear as an option quite early; and 1e-2e were still deadly if a DM didn't pull her punches. 3e was bloody deadly largely because they scaled up the monsters so much (and because the CR/EL system needed a bit of work, but that's on the DM to sort out). 4e's a different breed of animal - from what I've seen here it seems they'd either all die or all not die, they'd sink or swim as a unit - but it could still be rather deadly in the hands of a DM who let it be so.

Dont get me wrong. I actually dont want my dnd to be too deadly - I dont like auto dead at zero. PCs dying every session just gets you Bob the Fighter, Rob the Fighter, Nob the Fighter, etc - it's as bad as not dying at all.

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I expect it to be deadly, and play accordingly*. I too don't like auto-dead at 0 h.p.; having the range between 0 and -10 to work with allows for an unconsciousness mechanic and a dying mechanic that death-at-zero just can't give.

* - until I get bored and go gonzo, at which point I haul out the dice to roll up the next one...

Lanefan

Charlaquin said:

Would your stance on the matter be any different if 0e-2e had all been chock full of mechanical options? Cause if not, it isn’t a relevant detail.

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Yes it would, in my case, because if such were true then 5e would represent a very significant departure from the game's entire history and people would be quite justified in noting this.

The thing is, however, 5e isn't a departure from the game's entire history. Think of it more as a valid attempt to swing the pendulum back to the mid-point.

Lanefan said:

Where I think the reduction of options was an essential part of fixing the problems, and that (t)he looked back to pre-3e D&D for inspiration makes looking at those earlier editions very relevant indeed.

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Let’s assume you are objectively correct that the reduction of options was an essential part of fixing the problems. In that case, it would still have been an essential part if 0e-2e had been even more options heavy than 3e and they had pulled the idea of reducing the options out of thin air. Likewise, if the reduction of options was not essential and the problems could have been fixed without removing them, that would still be the case despite the fact that 0e-2e didn’t have as many mechanical options. Ergo, the options-density of those editions is a nonsequitur to the question of whether or not the option reduction was necessary.

Lanefan said:

Yes it would, in my case, because if such were true then 5e would represent a very significant departure from the game's entire history and people would be quite justified in noting this.

The thing is, however, 5e isn't a departure from the game's entire history. Think of it more as a valid attempt to swing the pendulum back to the mid-point.

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But the question is not whether or not 5e is consistent with the game’s history. The question is if the goals of 5e could have been achieved without the significant reduction of player-facing mechanical options. The answer to that question remains the same regardless of what that history is.

Charlaquin said:

But the question is not whether or not 5e is consistent with the game’s history. The question is if the goals of 5e could have been achieved without the significant reduction of player-facing mechanical options. The answer to that question remains the same regardless of what that history is.

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Nothing about the game is "necessary."


But the history, along with the playtest, show what works.